Hey, about a month ago, after having overclocked my system about 10% to try and sort out the slowing down over the past 2-3 months, something happened which meant my computer could no longer find the operating system. In that meantime, in attempt to try and get my rt73 wireless card to work and having problems with the sabayon linux installer, which frequently crashed and had great trouble insalling over another sabayon o.s, computer is back up and running, fast with wireless. However I've lost a lot of data, most of it not backed up, particularly annoying, are gp4 and gp5 tabs i donwnloaded for years and a few I had written myself. I have downloaded a free linux command line Testdisk and tried to install gtkrecover (which failed, something about widgets that didn't work), would anyone have any idea and be so kind as to share them with me, as to how they would go about searching for these files if they would still be on my hard drive system? My hard drive is rather large (about 500GB), thus if what I have read about files never realy being deleted just being allowed to be made space for other items is true, even after having re-installed and deleted o.s's about 20 times, there should still be enough space to keep them?

well, kinda. There actually should be an option to chdisk to recover broken partitions - the problem is that the way the linux filesystem works data is allocated logically, in clusters that are easy to access - when you delete data the data stays until it's overwritten, but it gets overwritten as soon as you do something, because it is occupying a "higher priority" block. So if you've reformatted about 20 times, chances are there's widespread corruption if anything left.